Very important. We think. OkCupid's most popular blogs posts were read by millions of people, and that was excluding existing OkCupid users. Still, we don't really have any way of measuring the effects, since direct signups from the blog posts were just a few thousand people each.But over the long run, we just kept hearing how everyone *loved* the posts so much, and that it was one of the big reasons they loved the site. Continue Reading

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Whoa => "The posts each took 4-8 weeks of full-time work for him to write. Plus another 2-4 weeks of dedicated programming time from someone else on the team. It's easy to look at an OkTrends post, with all its simple graphs and casual writing style and think someone just threw it together, but it probably had 50 serious revisions."

I was just about to add a comment with the exact same line. Insane dedication to quality. What's really striking is they say "still, we don't really have any way of measuring the effects, since direct signups from the blog posts were just a few thousand people each.", so you have to think they just had faith in the quality they were putting out vs metrics to actually back it up.

"We threw out a lot of research that didn't turn into good posts. Your startup probably can't afford to do this. It shouldn't waste like 10 man weeks of effort/focus/money on writing a blog post." —indicates that even though the work seems to have paid off, it was quite a risky strategy when considering the length of time required to do the work.

One of the most surprising notes in this Quora answer was that they weren't exactly sure how much the blog has actually contributed to their success — "Very important. We think. OkCupid's most popular blogs posts were read by millions of people, and that was excluding existing OkCupid users. Still, we don't really have any way of measuring the effects, since direct signups from the blog posts were just a few thousand people each."